Final Words
A TV Tuner card is a nice addition to any multimedia PC, and the NVIDIA DualTV MCE is a cut above most tuners because of its ability to record two sources at once. We especially like the fact that they do the signal splitting internally, rather than having two CATV inputs. The card is easy to install and sets up in a few minutes with Windows MCE. Of course, part of the advantage is that MCE practically sets itself up by auto scanning for the TV signal and then downloading the program guide for your specific area and cable service, letting you watch and record your favorite shows in no time.Not only is it nice to be able to record and archive as much video as your hard drive will allow, but having control over details like video quality are nice as well. On top of this, with a PC TV Tuner, the video that you capture can be edited and manipulated in limitless ways for projects ranging from home movies, show movie montages for creative purposes, or simply editing out commercials or unwanted scenes from your recordings. You can also burn the completed content to a DVD if you so choose. This is something that is just not possible with a service like TiVo, at least not without using a PC to do all the extra stuff.
Something we see as a bit of a drawback is that the DualTV MCE is marketed towards Windows XP MCE users to fully realize the card's potential, and you will need to purchase this version of Windows separately. However, the DualTV MCE does work with free (and not so free) TV tuner applications like SageTV, BeyondTV and Yahoo Go! for those without Windows MCE. The fact that the DualTV MCE is only marketed toward people with the Windows MCE is a bit odd, and we feel that they should perhaps offer a bundle package with the card and MCE, and even better would be the inclusion of a standalone application for viewing/recording in other versions of Windows.
As always, price will play a big role in which TV tuner is right for you, so lets look at this aspect for a moment. Right now, the DualTV MCE is being offered at the list price of $169 on the NVIDIA store website. This about twice as much as the ATI Theater 550 Pro, which is on the market for around $80. You could technically have two of these cards installed and recording at the same time to simulate what the DualTV MCE does, but it may be less than practical given the space it would take up on your motherboard (especially if building a small HTPC box). The Theater 550 Pro is an excellent TV tuner solution for those only needing to record one channel at a time, but we think the freedom of being able to record/watch an extra source makes the DualTV MCE worth the extra money.
For those who want to do some gaming but don't want any extra PCI slots used up in their system, one of ATI's AIW cards might be the right choice. The prices range from about $100 to $400 depending on what kind of graphics performance you want, but you will still only be able to record a single TV signal with these cards. You also run into the potential problem of losing the TV recording aspect if you have to upgrade your graphics card -- and given the rate at which GPUs are updated, that will probably happen within 18 months or less.
Separate TV tuner cards will ultimately be more versatile than an AIW when building a multimedia system, because they can be used in both gaming and non-gaming systems. This fact along with the dual recording capabilities of the NVIDIA DualTV MCE make it one of the best choices for those interested in buying a high quality TV tuner solution, especially for those with Windows MCE. About the only other competing dual-tuner solution we'd consider right now is the Hauppauge PVR-500. In terms of cost, online prices are slightly cheaper than the DualTV, but we expect similar pricing from the NVIDIA card once it hits the retail market, and at that point it's basically a tossup.
It's nice to know that there are alternatives to the cable companies' standard recording "services" like TiVo. These TV tuner cards provide the same service with more flexibility for those with computers, without an added monthly subscription fee. We predict that more people will be interested in integrating their TV and PC in the future, and cards like the NVIDIA DualTV MCE make this an attractive prospect for PC owners in the present.
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JarredWalton - Friday, May 19, 2006 - link
One more reason to use Firefox. :) Seriously - on most sites and forums (including this one), you don't lose the typed text when stuff like that happens. My suggestion if you want to use IE is to always copy the entire post when you're done, just in case. If it's a short post, no problem, but if you just typed a couple long paragraphs you probably want to exercise a bit of caution.Honestly, I'm not sure why you get timeouts for stuff like that (OMG - he hasn't posted in 15 minutes! Better timeout...), but it happens on most/all other forums I've been to as well.
Trisped - Sunday, May 21, 2006 - link
I get that error hitting reply and post comment about 50% of the time. 15 min time out seems posible, but it wouldn't make sense that I log in, open a bunch of windows, read for 15 min, try to post a reply, refresh, then post, read the nest new item, and have to refresh the browser again.For me it isn't such a big deal, as any important post is copied to the clip board first anyways.
Justin Case - Friday, May 19, 2006 - link
Anandtech's articles are worse than Tom's Hardware, these days. To compare the tuner quality they use completely different video sources! This is just too stupid to be true. It's like comparing two cars by driving one on a racing track and the other in a city, and then saying "the car driven in the city seems to be a bit slower". DUH!Anandtech's articles about RAID and storage have been bad for a long time, but at least the graphics / video articles used to have some vague credibility. This one really is just something to fill the space between the ads...
Not worth the bandwidth.
goinginstyle - Friday, May 19, 2006 - link
A lot of us in the office thought the Seagate review yesterday was very good and a lot better than what was published in the past. It certainly was better than any review on web so far about the 750GB drive with most of the sites completely missing the sata150 jumper issue and not even describing perpendicular recording. It was nice to see benchmarks besides hdtach and then declaring how fast a drive is because of burst speeds. The RAID 0 could have been dropped but at least they tried to shut some of us up about not having it. The issue with the video cards has been the lack of reviews. The Oblivion video card article was actually one of the best around but we need more like it. The motherboard section has been steady and strong lately. I do not think Tom's is better in that case at all.
As for this article-
The lack of the same images for comparison was a definite error, probably the biggest one that was made or could be made.
CPU utilization needed to be included along with a Happauge card.
TV antenna was not tested nor display out to a monitor or HD capable set.
FM tuner was not really mentioned or tested.
I am probably way off base on this one but does PureVideo work with this card for playback from external sources?
Was the article for beginners? It probably was and as such except for the error in image comparisons it was actually okay. Nobody has mentioned it yet but NVIDIA seems to have produced a nice card. It would be nice to see it put to more use and maybe they will come back and update this review.
JarredWalton - Friday, May 19, 2006 - link
In regards to the comments about the lack of depth on this review, we've had two reviews in the past that looked at the Theater 550 card, with http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.aspx?i=2393">one of those reviews comparing it to a Hauppauge card. Our conclusion in that review, which was done almost a year ago, was that the Hauppauge and ATI cards are the best two analog tuner cards on the market. The conclusion is that they basically are equivalent in terms of quality. What that means is that any new review only needs to really compared to one of those cards, and if quality is pretty much equal, everything is good.The NVIDIA DualTV MCE is indeed equivalent to the ATI card. The advantage is that it has dual tuners, which is something you can't get from ATI, but of course the Hauppauge PVR-500 offers that feature as well. There are no high-quality analog TV tuners that will also do HDTV, so I personally find it difficult to do a lengthy article dwelling on the best analog tuners when at best all of them are vastly inferior to HDTV. As I mentioned in my http://www.anandtech.com/multimedia/showdoc.aspx?i...">HTPC – TV Tuner Reviews article, getting the best of both worlds (especially in areas that have poor OTA reception) is a difficult and frustrating task.
If you only need one TV tuner, getting an ATI Theater 550 or a Hauppauge PVR-150/250/350 is a good idea. If you want to get a dual tuner setup, you can either purchased two of the above cards, or go with the NVIDIA DualTV or Hauppauge PVR-500. All of them are very similar in terms of performance and functionality. All of them are hardware-based encoders (as far as I'm aware), so CPU usage should stay below 10%, perhaps 25% if you were recording two channels at once.
Hopefully that clarifies things a bit. I personally am still waiting for the ideal TV tuner card, but I'm really not sure such a thing exists. I want dual tuners, analog and HDTV support, high-quality analog encoding, support for QAM decoding, the option to get the card in either PCI or PCI express format, and CableCARD support as well. I'm quite sure that such a card does not exist, and in fact it may never exist. :-(
Sunrise089 - Friday, May 19, 2006 - link
One thing I don't like seeing is that 99% of the time I can judge the quality I'm about to read by just looking at the author's name. I won't say who is good and who isn't, but it really suggest poor oversight and/or quality control. I know some authors will write better or have more vision for the article, but that would be true anywhere. At Gamespot.com they have reviews by like a dozen authors, but they almost all come out the same because they conform to a specific standard. At AT it seems obvious that different authors have widly varying levels of quality, and noone proof-reads the articles and tells the authors that they need to put in some more work.With other products (video cards) I can see the urge to have the review up fast so the readers don't rush to other sites, but this product isn't exactly the highest profile. I actually laughed out loud when I saw the image quality comparison shots were from DIFFERENT IMAGES.
nullpointerus - Friday, May 19, 2006 - link
Actually, I thought the article was quite good. IMO the problem is that the article was written for the wrong audience. There are the HTPC-nuts like myself who really research their buying decisions and tweak their software to make it work just so, and then there are the quickie-$29-tuner people who expect an all-in-one solution that just works. I think the article was written for the latter - hence the lack of in-depth comparisons and the confusion about lack of bundled software.mindless1 - Saturday, May 20, 2006 - link
Don't you have that a little backwards? The people who buy the expensive cards are generally those who do not tweak much of anything, because they're accepting the default hardware encoding, hardware that is wasted if someone doesn't want to do one-pass straight to MPEG2. It is those who buy the expensive card that want to not think about it, to just "have it work".Those buying the other cards, some are just cheapskates, others have legitimate rationality that it's a bit silly to pay for mid-quality hardware encoding unless you ONLY want MPEG2. MPEG2 is becoming a bad choice, if you have a real HTPC. Quality:size worse than MPEG4 and loss too high for editing/re-encoding purposes. It's best if your old standalone DVD player is the playback device.
nullpointerus - Saturday, May 20, 2006 - link
No, it's not backwards. I'll repeat it. There are people who are interested in spending as little as possible and just stick with whatever bundled TV/PVR app the manufacturer has thrown in, and then there are people who want the best possible experience and are willing to spend a little more time and money to pick out different PVR software, compare cards, swap decoders, and so on. Obviously, that doesn't cover the whole range of users, but it's not supposed to; the contrast is merely there to point out the decidedly different audiences for which this article might have been written.And if your logic were true in the general case, you couldn't explain why audiophiles - who are incessant tweakers - will pay upwards of $1,000 for a set of cables. But then again, I don't think anybody can explain that to my satisfaction. ;) In any case, it does happen, so your viewpoint isn't exactly all-encompassing, either.
mindless1 - Sunday, May 21, 2006 - link
Ok, so I still disagree. Those who have no idea what they're doing will tend to buy a hardware based card, because they don't KNOW the differences or benefits, they don't realize that if they want a superior result then the $ for a hardware compressor card was wasted money.I AM an audiophile and we could go on and on for years about overpriced cables, and it just isn't applicable here (though personally as an audiophile, IF I were to go for premium cotton sleeved/silver cabling, I would make it myself).
It is true that there are some casual users who don't know a lot about cards and only see the cost, or those that only watch TV for the most part. Then again there are also those with the most experience and will laugh at anyone recording to MPEG2 unless the sole goal was to record it straight to a DVD. BTW I have over a dozen capture cards, though not those in this review and I don't feel I'm missing out.